The broken promise of a research fund for maths points to wider issues
Some of you will be old enough to remember when prime minister Rishi Sunak was telling us of his love of maths and how the subject should be a compulsory part of daily life for anyone not old enough to buy alcohol. You might even recall our story from Monday’s Playbook about how the prime minister and his wife have funded—with their own money—a computing and data centre at a Californian liberal arts college.
It might come as a surprise, then, to learn that funding is being pulled from the UK’s Additional Funding Programme for Mathematical Sciences. Just another normal day in the innovation nation on our way to securing that science superpower status.